This morning for no apparent reason I woke up around 6:10 am and the first thought I had when I got up was, “It seems pretty bright for being 6.” Then I was reminded of how my granddad used to always announce with excitement every year sometime around now, “This is the longest day of the year!”

While I missed the summer solstice this year, June 20th. The early morning light reminded me that he is gone, and reminded me of all the little things he would do that at the time I didn’t think much of but now I miss.

I hope everyone is doing well make sure you tell someone you love that you love them.

Last week I played in a $100k guarantee tournament. It started late day and was 2 flights. On the first flight I crashed and burned when I lost all energy and just couldn’t think straight; while I did make it to the 2nd day I was short stacked and I think I played poorly.

The reason I am writing today is because I experience the same thing after about a long poker session… My brain just seemed to stop working.

Moral of the story – don’t overdo it. Take breaks. Make notes. And eat something before it’s too late.

An Old Site With a Specific Purpose

Years ago (more than 9) I bought a domain called CNCDatabase with the thought that CNC programmers and operators should not have to buy software that hardly works to make conversion of G-code or other “CNC” code from one machine to another. The typical shop could be full of 10 machines and each one of them could speak its own language. I hated the fact that for me to write my own tools I would have to learn the particulars of each machine.

Instead I imagined a Wiki Site that would act as a cross reference.

I Got Started On That a Few Times BUT…

MediaWiki was hard and life was getting in the way. Between health issues and just trying to pay bills I was getting nowhere fast. Eventually I scrapped the idea and moved on. BUT something kept bugging me. Ever time I did anything with tools, machines, nuts, bolts, car parts, lawn mowers, etc… I would always need more information than I could find. So somewhere along the lines, with a little more knowledge about what is possible, I purchased MachineDB.com (approx 4-5 years ago).

Nearly Impossible: Made Me Start

So I sat on this domain for some time, but about a month ago I ran into a situation where I needed to find information about the mower, mower engine, and carburetor for the lawn mower I had just purchased.

Nearly impossible! I don’t know who puts the online catalogs together, but they are stupid! They are so stupid in fact that it pushed me into starting MachineDB.com

Now I Need Help

I will reserve pleading for help at a later date when I have gotten a few things figured out, but if you know MediaWiki or you love data entry or data organization. Then you would be a good fit, and I need your help now!

Keep checking back for more details as I get going on this thing!

If you are interested in helping just leave a comment here or check the page out yourself. Also if you think CNCDataBase could be useful let me know!

Pick a moment when you’ve led, when the project didn’t work, when there was failure. Tell us what happened and why it’s personal… and why it’s not.

I’m taken back to an incident that happened when I was working for my grandfather, we were planning on taking the flange world on (oil field meter tubes and pipe flanges). I learned how to program a CNC machine, taught myself how to run the thing, and figured a lot of things out along the way.

My grandfather had a great idea of a new way to assemble the meter tube and flange, a more efficient and effective way that literally could have changed the way oil companies operated by making their measurement capabilities more precise.

We worked out so much of the plans for how this would move forward, how we would be able to bootstrap this business into existence and how it would grow and change over time. I started researching the industry and competition. And the time had finally arrived where we were going to place a huge order, and start on our path to bigger and better things…

I get everything ready, I’ve talked with 10 different suppliers from around the world and have narrowed it down to 1 forge out of Romania. We knew enough at the time to avoid India and China because so many companies had problems in the past they would downright reject the metal before it was out of the box. So here I am crossing my ts and dotting my is, checking everything over and over, and I finally fax my order off. And we wait…

6 weeks later crate after crate full of thousands of pounds of metal arrives and we open the first one, “Hey! This isn’t right!!!” my granddad exclaimed.

We had just paid around $30,000 for junk.

On our order I had missed a letter code, I had it wrong from the start. It was something I just didn’t know. None of the forges I had quoted from looked at our spec drawings to see we had the wrong order code. We had just paid around $30,000 for junk. And to make matters worse East European metal and forgings had recently been put on the suspect list of poor quality. So we could have sold this incorrect order and been fine if it was from somewhere else.

I led that, but the wrong direction. I should have sought some outside help but never even thought about it as a possibility. It was so personal because I felt like I had messed up, and I had made the mistake that was going to not allow us to grow the way we had hoped. But I learned enough from that experience and our business had grown enough in just me learning to run and program the CNC machine that it actually wasn’t a bad experience.